E13: Celebrating Workforce Development Month: Changing Lives with Wayne Williams

Alexis Franks

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, all you workforce warriors across the country. My name is Alexis Franks, and I am your Director of Membership for the National Association of Workforce Development Professionals. And welcome to another episode of Workforce on the Mic presented by NAWDP. September is Workforce Development Month, and it’s a time to celebrate the incredible professionals across the country who dedicate their careers to building stronger communities, helping job seekers find meaningful employment, and supporting businesses with the talent they need to thrive. As a part of this celebration, we are taking some time to highlight our workforce heroes, those professionals that go above and beyond in their service and their impact. And today, I am honored to be joined by the GOAT, Mr. Wayne Williams, with Eastern Indiana Workforce Development Board. He has made such a remarkable difference in the lives of so many that he has touched in workforce development. So today we get to take the journey, or his journey, through some challenges and successes that he has experienced and the passion that makes him the person he is today. So Wayne, welcome to you.

Wayne Williams

Thank you very much. I am excited to be here. I’m excited to have this conversation. And it’s September. I love Workforce Development Month.

Alexis Franks

Yes, September is the perfect time of year. I think we talked about it’s all of the things. It’s fall, it’s football season, it’s Workforce Development Month. So, there’s so many things to do and celebrate. So again, we’re just glad to have you with us today.

Wayne Williams

Thank you.

Alexis Franks

So we’re just going to jump in to a few questions for you as one of our long-standing workforce heroes. So Wayne, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in workforce?

Wayne Williams

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for asking. I started the last semester of my undergrad in an internship serving at-risk youth in a residential treatment facility, and it was a means to an end, it was to graduate from college, and decided that I liked the work enough that I’d kind of stick it out. I had a significant amount of hands-on experience and quite a bit of navigating through the court system with young people. And over the period of six years, found that while the work was very rewarding, it was very, very taxing, both on the staff members that worked with the young people, and of course the young people themselves, and not to put us before them, but it’s very trying work. There’s a ton of turnover. But we made tremendous strides with young people, but I knew that this wasn’t a job for a person that might have been starting a family and that needed less of a physical job. So, I wanted to pair that hands-on experience with a little bit of case management experience and started to apply for jobs, you know, State Department of Children’s Services and kind of organizations and the like, and wasn’t really getting anywhere. So, I hadn’t, I hadn’t had children yet. You know, it was recently married and it was like, You know what? I think I can, I think I can find a better match somewhere else. So, I tell people this story and they’re like, there’s no way that you did this, but I took out a map, I threw darts at a map, and if I’m being honest, I tried to stay towards the southeast of the United States somewhere warm, not so much the rapidly changing seasons of the Midwest and go try for a year of doing some case management. And I was fortunate enough to work for a company called Children’s Home Society of Florida. They contracted with the state to do, you know, dependency care of children. Maybe it was newborns that were born into addiction. Maybe it was young people transitioning in and out or through the foster care system. Maybe there were some adoption cases, but I got the case management experience that I wanted. It’s been a lot of time in court writing judicial reviews, working with families, working with caregivers, trying to help them navigate the system. And about a year in, I was like, okay, I’ve had enough. That work, I thought would be a little bit easier, quote unquote, easier to do than direct care. It was actually much more emotionally taxing because of these incredibly tough situations that children that cannot care for themselves have been through. And I moved back to Indiana and then started kind of looking for the next thing that I wanted to do. And I found the Indiana Impact Program, which is the Indiana Manpower Placement and Comprehensive Training Program, is the term they give to individuals that are on the welfare system with TANF and SNAP. And didn’t really know how that process worked in helping those individuals, but applied, knew that it was going to be mostly case management, care management, things like that, was in the interview. And I think I told you in prep, I would never, ever, ever tell a job seeker to do this, but the interviewers asked me, what do you know about workforce development? And I said, “I’ve never heard the term before.” Just being young and probably being nervous is why that came out that way. But what I found out real quick was what workforce development is and what it absolutely can be. So immediately started working with those folks that applied for benefits, a very challenging work for folks that had been very reliant on the system. Most of our listeners that work and work for, specifically those that work in TANF and SNAP, will know that if you’ve applied for those type of benefits, there’s the Child Care Development Fund, which can help with vouchers. So, if you have young children and your main barrier in going back to work is not having child care, applying for those benefits and receiving those despite, you know, maybe a waiting list can help start to alleviate some of those challenges. I grew very quickly in that role. And I remember calling my mother and just telling her, hey, I got this new job. And she’s like, what are you doing? And I said, well, I’m helping people that are on food stamps and they’re receiving cash assistance. And she told me the office that I was working in was the same office that she would take my brother and I to when she needed to get her SNAP benefits when I was a child. And I only called that a full circle moment years later. But when I tell people that story, they’re like, wow. And it took me a little bit to realize that this is exactly where I need to be. I enjoyed the work. I enjoyed the people that I worked with. I enjoyed the customers. What I really enjoyed about it most was feeling like I had worked closely enough with someone and empowered them enough to either have the tools or know where to find the tools to get back to work so that I never saw them again. And I’ve kind of stood on that business for a long time. Like if I never see you again, then most likely that means I’ve done a good job in working with you. Kind of shifted to various roles in quality assurance, kind of ran the orientations there, which were very large in Indianapolis at the time, and then started to look at what else could I do in the workforce system where my skills would really be utilized, where I could have more fun and grow a little bit, and learned that there was a project under WIA at the time where they were taking services that are traditionally provided in American job centers out into the community. So they’re hanging out at food banks, they’re in parking lots when Gleaners is doing like a mobile food handout, or they’re in churches, or in their community centers, or they’re in community colleges. And I was like, now that, that sounds cool. Really, we talk about in the workforce system a lot, meeting people where they are, and that term is generally applied to where somebody is in their journey, not always physically where they are. This project was taking services to people’s faces, which I thought was an incredibly cool approach. And I know it’s been around for a long time, and a lot of workforce programs still do mobile programming or kind of on-the-go programming. Spent some time doing that. A really cool grant for the contractor I was working with came up, an H-1B grant that was taking displaced white-collar workers and putting them into tech occupations, which was a whole different animal. A lot of the work I had done before was with people that just didn’t have access to resources, that lived in areas where there was no food access, you know, people that had like really fallen on tough times. I’d never worked with the demographic of folks that were certainly in a very trying period of their life, but had been high earners for so long. Their list of challenges was entirely different than maybe that TANF or SNAP recipient. So learned more there, grew more there. And then in 2018, the Eastern Union Workforce Development Board, who was doing services in the American Job Center system themselves put out for bid a Title I contract to do those services in the AJCs, and I was the project director for that project for a few years. Moving to the one-stop operator role, which is where I really found a lot of my passion for the work, kind of maybe re-found passion for the work, because I was able to start telling the story of what the workforce system did. And then recently rejoined the workforce board in a community engagement role, which is much like that one-stop operator role, asking people what they need, how we can help them. I think the last time maybe you and I spoke, maybe on another podcast, I would always tell people that I was the plug. Like, if you needed something, call me, and if we don’t have it, I know who does, and we’ll make that connection, kind of like that old visual of a telephone operator. You call the operator, they unplug you from one, one hole to the next to connect you to the right person. I think my mantra has evolved a little bit into, I’m just an extension of your team, whether that’s the TANF program, whether that’s an EDC, maybe the Chamber of Commerce. The best part about it is, that I’m on somebody else’s payroll. How great is that? You don’t even have to pay me to be a part of your team. So that’s where we’re at now. Next September, I would love to reconnect, because next September is 15 years for me in workforce development, a very incredibly cool milestone. And if you would ask me 14 years ago, is this what you want to do for the rest of your life? I think I would have been like, yeah, absolutely. I love workforce development. I love the relationships. I love the work that we do. I love the opportunity. And this is going to sound maybe a tad bit cliche or maybe even corny, but we get paid to change people’s lives. We get changed to help, you know, we get paid to help employers. We get paid to connect people with things they didn’t know they had access to. That’s insane that we get paid to do that. And I think that it’s a very unique opportunity for all of us to transform the lives of our communities.

Alexis Franks

Right. And Wayne, you said a lot. You’ve seen a lot of experiences in workforce development. But what I love about the progression of your career the last 14 years, looking forward to 15, is that you were intentional about that next step every single time. And for a lot of workforce professionals, we know it’s not something that they grew up playing in the sandbox wanting to do, but it is a career that they found to be worthwhile, to be something that they can stay with long term. So I just really appreciate that piece of how you wanted to focus on what skills you had and where it could take you in workforce development. And then having that full circle moment is truly, truly always impactful for you. But I’m sure it’s also impactful for the people that you’ve served as well or the communities that you’ve assisted as well. Can you talk a little bit about that too?

Wayne Williams

Yeah, absolutely. For a long time of helping, we call them frontline team members, but the coaches that are working in these programs that are helping people get back to work, think that job is like the only job. So kind of taking a step back, even when Eastern Indiana works or other workforce boards or other service providers are often asked to go to middle schools or high schools to talk about the services they provide, typically through the American Job Center system, to tell young people like, hey, once you graduate, or even now, if you need help finding a job, if you need help refining your resume, getting your interview skills in order, accessing technology, you know, like communicating over Zoom with an employer, things like that, that’s something we can help with. What we don’t talk enough about in those moments is that, did you know there’s a career that helps people get careers? We’re often invited to the table to talk about the services we provide, but we rarely talk about, we’re rarely an employer in the room. And that’s something I think that is missed. And what happens is now you have folks that are working in the system and they’re doing incredible work and they’re taking home, an insurmountable amount of emotional baggage every single day and helping a tough clientele, typically a tough clientele, or at least a clientele that’s having the toughest day they’ve had in a long time, without having conversations of, you wouldn’t believe how much more there is. And I really made that a personal mission of myself when I was supervising teams to say, you’re doing fantastic work and we always want you to stay here, but the reality of it is that you have an opportunity to grow and go do something else much larger than what you might be able to accomplish here. And know that just because workforce development is its own vertical, so to speak, that economic development is workforce development. Community development is workforce development. And 85, 95% of the skills that you’ve learned here under that workforce development vertical are transferable to just about anything else in our ecosystem. In the past, I’ve had a lot of team members leave through those conversations, but what ends up happening is you’ve created a relationship and a network that feeds back into the work that you do because you allowed that person and help them grow in their role.

Alexis Franks

So you said something really important there too. We’ve had a lot of conversations, especially with this Workforce Development Month, one of the themes that we’re focusing around is really making some noise, that workforce is a career. And those individuals that even work in fiscal departments or tech departments, if you have a connection and an understanding of workforce development as an ecosystem, that makes you a workforce professional. And we want to celebrate the work that we all do and keep that industry alive and growing and thriving as well. So I think your personal mission is definitely pushing things along, but we definitely are making some noise this Workforce Development Month with your help. So we appreciate that.

Wayne Williams

Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, I want to touch on a point you just made. I love when you roll out the celebration of the heroes every September and I get to look at the long PDF that you put together on your website and go through every single person. First of all, I go through them all and I connect with them on LinkedIn if I’m not connected. But I love going through and seeing that there’s such a diverse group of professionals on that list. It’s not just workforce board members and it’s not just service provider team members. There is, it’s just, there’s a spectrum of people that are workforce heroes that don’t have maybe a traditional workforce title. And it just plays back to like, this isn’t, we’re not in it alone. Everybody is an extension of one another. So every September, I literally wait for that publication to go through and be like, man, you know, somebody that’s new to this would ask the question, why is this person on there? They’re not a workforce person. How are they a workforce hero? But that it really plays on. And the organization, NAWDP, does a fantastic job at this of making that noise and saying that, hey, there’s a billion different things to do in this industry. It’s not just the person helping a job seeker and it’s not just the person helping an employer.

Alexis Franks

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think with this month and the advocacy work that we want to focus on and really making sure that our network of even legislators and other political individuals in our local communities really understand the impact of what we’re bringing to the economy and those that live in our community. So it’s a great opportunity to highlight all of those things. And while we’re on that topic, I don’t know if you have any that you’d like to share of successes or strategies or programs that you’ve seen that have been effective in communities, but we’d love to hear, you know, what you’ve seen.

Wayne Williams

So yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of really great programs out there. And not to take us back to a time that we dread, but COVID, for everything that it wasn’t, was an opportunity for workforce programs to ask themselves, how can we do things differently? How can we reach people that can’t reach us? And of course, there was mobile programming and lots of outreach, but not a lot of programs were doing virtual programming, reaching people that just absolutely couldn’t access you, whether it was because your office was closed or because they had a 45-minute commute to a center or to an employer. And that really pushed folks to examine how their, what their business model was. And as funding changed alongside programming models changing, we had to kind of look inward and say, how are we able to serve a greater amount of people with the same money or the same amount of folks or maybe less money or less amount of folks to really be efficient in how we’re serving others. So, and that continues to evolve all the time. There’s really cool software, VR is hot, AI is hot. We’re doing a lot of things differently than we were just a couple of years ago. And I like to see folks evolving in that way. But I think one of the coolest, coolest, best approaches is just creating a human connection with the people that you serve. When they know they can call you for just about anything, whether or not you can actually provide it, that human connection leads people to be more confident and get back to work. It doesn’t matter if it’s an entitlement program like TANF or SNAP. It doesn’t matter if it’s a volunteer program like WIOA, like you’ve picked yourself up and you’re like asking somebody, I just need help. That human connection is what drives results. And in our industry, those results really matter. Those results are tied to funding. Those results are tied to, can I get more dollars to help the people that I need to help? Those results are important. And what happens probably more often than we’d all like to admit is that we’re not creating that human connection on the front end. So when somebody goes and gets a job, they’re not likely to report it. And that’s a problem. And it’s not just a problem for funding reasons. It’s mainly a problem because we exist to celebrate your success. And if we don’t know you’ve been successful, it’s impossible to celebrate it. I have one story, if you’ll indulge me, of kind of my first ever success story with a customer. I had a young woman who had a couple children, came in to do her orientation for TANF. She explained that the children’s father was unable to work, so it was kind of all on her. She was in tears. For lack of a better term, it did look like she kind of drug herself into the office that morning. She just didn’t want to be there, but she knew she had to because she had two young children and she had to figure out the next step. And over some, pretty quick conversation, I realized that she had a cosmetology license. And I thought, how strange is it that you don’t see yourself as employable, like you have a credential. And that was a rare occurrence in a TANF program, that somebody had a marketable, tangible credential. And she had some really significant beauty issues about herself, which again, struck me as like ironic, like you work in the beauty industry, but you don’t see yourself as beautiful. So realizing that I’m a man and that she’s a woman, you know, I knew there was some, some boundaries that needed to be stuck to there. But I spent some time just kind of taking the paperwork away and saying, let’s just have a conversation about why you don’t think this is possible because you are beautiful and you do have something to provide. And I guarantee you that if you truly want to go back to work and you don’t want to be on the system, quote unquote system, that there’s an opportunity that lies literally around the corner. And we worked through that for a few minutes. And I said, hey, if, I’ll be here till four or five, whatever time the office closed. I said, if you want to go home and, put on some makeup and put on your most beautiful dress or whatever and go right around the corner to, you know, this barbershop that was around the corner, I bet, I bet you they’re going to offer you a job. And sure, she came back the same day before, it was right before we closed and said, you’re not going to believe this. And I said, I am going to believe this. Because luckily enough, my wife’s a cosmetologist, so I knew kind of what that industry looked like. And she said, I start on Tuesday. Like she started the next week. So, and she was crying and we hugged and I was like, this is, you’re getting paid to do this, Wayne. How insane is it that you’re getting paid to just help people be more confident? And it’s a small piece of all the things that we do, but, and I never saw her again. And kind of going back to what I said before, like, I would like to hope that she’s maybe still in that industry. She’s still doing good work. But it was an hour, hour and a half conversation of being like, you can do this. You are marketable. You have the skills. You just need the confidence. And if that’s what I can provide to you, then we’ve married all the things together that you need to go back to work. And she did. And she absolutely did.

Alexis Franks

Yeah, that is amazing. And I think a big piece of that, having that confidence in your ability to be employed, to have your own career, that’s huge to impart to somebody else. That’s something that they can take away with them for the rest of their career, for the rest of their life. Like you said, if they don’t see you ever again, that may be an impactful moment that just sticks. And we know that there’s so many of those stories that’s very similar of individuals creating that environment in that moment to leave a young person or an adult, anyone with something that sticks with them for the rest of their life. So I really appreciate you sharing that story. I’m glad we got to that today. And I know we’re getting a little short on time. So I did just have a couple more questions for you. So for all of our workforce warriors today, what advice would you give someone that’s just starting out in their career and workforce?

Wayne Williams

It’s a great question. I’ve been asked it several times. And if I had to pick one thing to start with, it’s become intimately familiar with the workforce system. Especially as a frontline team member, as a job seeker facing team member, one of your biggest superpowers can be knowing what to do next when there’s a question asked or a service you need to provide that you can’t. You know, being intimately familiar with the required partners under WIOA when you work in a job center is really important. Knowing that TANF and SNAP programs may have training funding or funding to help an individual to go back and get their high school diploma is really important when your program doesn’t have it. Knowing where to send somebody next is really important. Now, we don’t want to shuffle people through this system. That doesn’t make sense. And we know it’s not as easy as just saying, hey, they have it over there. Somebody may not have transportation. They may have walked to your office that morning. It’s not as easy as just saying, hey, go to the next place. But knowing about how all the parts and pieces fit together, that’s the greatest power somebody can have in a workforce, is knowing that everything that’s available to an employer, everything that’s available to a partner, and everything that’s available to a job seeker, it really does have power. That way you don’t leave somebody hanging. And the charge is, knowing what this menu looks like in the ecosystem is A1, but kind of an A2 is treat every person you work with like you would your mother or your father or your brother or your sister or your cousins or whoever it is, because those people are somebody’s brother, mother, father, or cousins. We don’t close at 4:30 because that’s what time the office closes. If somebody comes in right before we close, we stay with them until we’ve established a good next step with them. That’s important. Do those two things. If you’re new to workforce, know everything that exists, and I know that’s a tall order, and I’m not talking about starting to read WIOA. You probably won’t get far through it before you’re like, what is this? But taking time over time to learn what’s available and treating every customer like an individual, like they truly are special. And if you do that, then what will start to happen is you’ll start to learn more about what’s available, kind of going back to what we talked about, that, oh, economic development is workforce. Oh, there’s things to do with community development. Oh, there’s other providers that I can go work with that have something really a special program that might, you know, kind of fill my bucket. Being knowledgeable about the work that we do and specifically why we do it, I think is paramount.

Alexis Franks

Absolutely. I 100% agree. And I think you’ve given us some of our, we usually have our typical mic drop moments on every episode. So you’ve given us some great mic drop moments. Know the ecosystem, treat everyone as an individual. I think those are two things, tangible things we can take away from our conversation today. And Wayne, so my last question for you, you’ve been recognized as a workforce hero for multiple years now. And what does that mean for you?

Wayne Williams

I think it’s, I think it’s, I think it runs alongside like an actor winning an Oscar. And I know that, you know what I mean? It’s not me trying to flatter you or not up for anything, but to be recognized as a hero for the work that you do, again, knowing you get paid and you’re entrusted to help others, to be recognized as a hero in your industry is, it’s not only flattering, but when you have folks that have nominated you that you may not have ever actually met in person, they just, they’ve heard about the great work that you do that feel compelled to be like, you know what, this guy or this gal is fantastic. I don’t know if there’s a higher honor. Maybe there is, maybe there will be in the future. I don’t know. But for right now, the fact that NAWDP established Workforce Development Month and decided to recognize people as workforce heroes, I don’t think there’s a greater honor. I really don’t.

Alexis Franks

Well, we are definitely honored for you to be one of our workforce heroes as well. And we want to take just a moment to recognize all of our workforce heroes for 2025. If you haven’t seen our workforce heroes booklet on our website, feel free to reach out to visit nawdp.org on that Workforce Development Month page, you will see that booklet right down at the bottom there. So feel free to check that out. Wayne, thank you again so much for joining us today. As always, it is a pleasure to be able to connect and engage with you, hear your story, and take away some encouragement. And hopefully our listeners are encouraged today. So thank you for joining us. And if anyone wants to get in touch with you or just connect, what’s the best way to do that?

Wayne Williams

I’m on TikTok, LinkedIn, and Instagram at Wayne Will Made It. And I appreciate the time, Alexis. Happy Workforce Development Month.

Alexis Franks

All right, thank you.